In consequence, South Carolina, entirely subservient to the influence of Calhoun, who in August issued another manifesto, passed in November the nullification ordinance, to take effect the following February.

And the same may be said in reference to Calhoun's nullification doctrines.

Tennessee sympathized as little with the nullification movement of these two States at this time as she sympathized with South Carolina in her nullification movement a generation later.

Maintaining persistence, and gradually gathering strength almost continuously since the nullification furor of 1832, it had become something more than a sentiment among its devotees: it had grown into a species of cult or party religion, for the existence of which no better reason can be assigned than that it sprang from a blind hero-worship locally accorded to John C. Calhoun, one of the prominent figures of American political history.

During the dessert which succeeded the sumptuous Christmas-dinner, where old and young took part, and "all went merry as a marriage-bell," the health of John C. Calhoun, then heading the nullification party, was formally proposed by Colonel La Vigne, as "first of men, and greatest of statesmen.

A generation before, he was himself a prominent actor in opposing the nullification plot.

Passing by lesser manifestations of the same character, we come to the eventful nullification proceeding in South Carolina in the year 1832.

A man of Burr's character might perhaps have accomplished something mischievous in Kentucky when Wilkinson was in the first flush of his Spanish intrigues; or when the political societies were raving over Jay's treaty; or when the Kentucky legislature was passing its nullification resolutions.

It is suspended in both houses of Congress; opened and closed at the pleasure of the slave representation; opened for the promulgation of nullification sophistry; closed against the question, What is slavery?

According to the nullification theory, the constitution is held to be of the nature of a compact between the States as one party and the Federal Government as the other; and that, as in all contracts, if the agreements contained therein are broken by the one party, the other party has the right to refuse its assent thereto.

The latter stepped around like a young girl, and brought a heavy book to show me the sketch of her sister, Marie Henrietta Pinckney, who, in the nullification time of 1830, wrote a pamphlet in defence of the State.

At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville, in 1795, one of the toasts was "The four western counties of Pennsylvania; may they repent their folly and sin no more"; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later they sympathized with the Kentuckians and Virginians in their nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws.

Many men were indeed aware, through tradition and history, that it was but the Calhoun nullification treason revived and pushed to a bolder extreme.

The hasty and seemingly earnest action of the people and authorities of South Carolina was looked upon as a historical repetition of the nullification crisis of 1831-32; and without examining too closely the real present condition of affairs, men hoped, rather than intelligently expected, that the parallel would continue to the end.

Jackson's action at the time of the nullification episode may well be compared with Buchanan's inaction in 1860-61.